My flyby trip to the UP

UP in case you don’t know, stands for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I had been there before, but merely driving through, though I did manage to get my second highest bowling score of all time there (164!). This time I went up to do a half-day talk at the Upper Peninsula Region of Library Cooperation’s annual conference in Marquette, Michigan. I decided to add a few days to my trip since I rarely get to the UP and it’s lovely. Someone from MetaFilter noticed that I was going to be up near Michigan Tech and invited me to do a public talk there, so I got to take a nice drive out to Houghton Michigan and meet some folks there and see the public and MTU libraries. I took a few photos: here is the Portage Lake District Library. I’m still uploading my photos of the MTU archives. Thanks to everyone for showing me around.

My page of notes from the talks is here. I tried to go the extra mile and not just link to keynote and pdf versions of my talks but also hyperlink the specific sites I mentioned so that people could click through to them relatively easily. We’ll see how this goes. One of the things I enjoyed doing was checking out the digital archives that were available online: Keweenaw Digital Archives and the Upper Peninsula Digitization Center Collections. I love this photo for example, with all the people commenting on who the people in the photo actually are. I used this photo in one of my talks.

protecting privacy in libraries

Judah Hamer, the current president of the Vermont Library Association, wrote a good opinion piece in the Burlington Free Press responding to a parent’s editorial concerned about Vermont’s new patron privacy laws. I think it’s always a good idea that official-type library people spend the time to outline just why we feel privacy is important and speaking up in order to dispell rumors that spread about what did and did not happen in a given library dispute.

hello ala.org

I have to say I had no idea when I wrote my post the other day that the redesigned ALA.org was going live this week. It looks pretty good, with my minor nitpick being the main page title says “ALA | ALA | Home” in my browser bookmarks which seems a little weird (titles seem borked sitewide actually). Was sort of hoping to see a “Hey it’s live!” page link with info about the transition but honestly, it’s so darned nice looking and normal looking, that seems like a minor quibble. What do you think?

Also: if you see something that is not just not to your tastes but actually broken, please be part of the solution and take the time to email the web team and let them know what happened. Every new site launch comes with a bunch of unexpected little glitches, let’s help ALA fix theirs.

a few lovely little sites

I’m doing some site round-ups for a few upcoming talks and I found a few things that I thought you might enjoy.

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